KING'S EVIL, an old, but not yet obsolete, name given to the scrofula, which in the popular estimation was deemed capable of cure by the royal touch. The practice of "touching" for the scrofula, or "King's Evil," was confined amongst the nations of Europe to the two Royal Houses of England and France. It can not be traced back to an earlier date than the reign of Edward III. in England, and of St. Louis (Louis IX.) in France; conse quently, it is believed that the performance of healing by the touch emanated in the first instance from the French crusader king, whose miraculous powers were subsequently transmitted to his descendant and representative, Isabella of Valois, wife of Ed ward II. of England. In any case, Queen Isabella's son and heir, Edward III., claimant to the French throne by his mother, was the first English king to order a public display of an attribute that had hitherto been associated with the Valois kings alone. From his reign dates the use of the "touch-piece," a gold medal given to the sufferer as a kind of talisman, which was originally the angel coin, stamped with designs of St. Michael and of a three
masted ship.
The actual ceremony seems first to have consisted of the sover eign's personal act of washing the diseased flesh with water, but under Henry VII. the use of an ablution was omitted, and a regular office was drawn up for insertion in the Service Book. The king now merely touched his afflicted subject in the presence of the court chaplain who offered up certain prayers and of wards presented the touch-piece, pierced so that it might be sus pended by a ribbon round the patient's neck. The Hanoverian kings declined to touch, and there exists no further record of any healing ceremony thenceforward at the English court. The prac tice, however, was continued by the exiled Stuarts, and was con stantly performed in Italy by James Stuart, "the old Pretender," and by his two sons. See A. M. Hocart, Kingship (1927).